When I opened The Red and the Black, the sky outside the window matched the mood of the book in an unexpected way. It was a gloomy afternoon. The clouds hung low. Light squeezed through the gaps in the shutters and fell on the pages like a thin scratch of a blade.
Stendhal’s writing gave me a cold sensation — like the first cool breeze of autumn cutting through a shirt and drilling into the skin. It woke me up quickly. The book grew heavier on my lap, because that young man named Julien Sorel slowly pressed all of his ambition, humiliation, love, and death into the palms of my hands.
Why should a carpenter’s son sit at a marquis’s dinner table
When Julien first appeared, he was holding a book. In a household where everyone carried woodworking tools tucked under their arms, this detail was like a thorn. He was thin. Pale. When he read, there was an uncomfortable light in his eyes.
He truly did not belong in the sawmill. He did not belong in the seminary either. He did not even belong in those glittering Parisian drawing rooms. Everywhere he went, he looked like a child wearing adult clothes — desperately straightening his back, desperately memorizing etiquette, desperately figuring out his answer before the other person finished speaking.
He held grudges. He schemed. He silently gave everyone around him a score. But every single page tells you the same truth: every unlikeable thing about this uncomfortable young man grew from the soil of humiliation. He could recite the entire Latin Bible from memory. The marquis’s daughter said he looked like “a wolf ready to bite at any moment.” That was an accurate description. Wolves do not need to be liked.
The love of two women served as a mirror, showing two faces of Julien
The two most important women in Julien’s life were Madame de Rênal and Mademoiselle de La Mole. One was gentle like the morning fog of a small town. The other was sharp like a dagger from Paris.
Julien’s pursuit of Madame de Rênal was mixed with too much pride and calculation. But he miscalculated one thing: he truly fell in love with her. That night in the stuffy summer garden, when he took her hand, his whole body trembled. Mathilde was a different kind of fire. She was too intelligent to not be world-weary. She was too proud to not be in pain. Julien’s appearance was like a knife stabbed into her boredom. No one knew whether his harshness was armor that Julien had built from years of hunger and cold.
Madame de Rênal loved the soft child that Julien kept hidden. Mathilde loved the tough man that Julien tried so hard to play. Both women truly loved him. But they loved different sides of him. Julien thought he was choosing between two women. In truth, he was choosing which version of himself he wanted to be.
In the shadow of the guillotine stood a man who would not bow his head
At the end of The Red and the Black, Julien sits in prison waiting for death. He refuses Mathilde’s escape plans. He refuses Madame de Rênal’s visits. He refuses the priest’s confession. He says:
“You are not judging me for the gun I fired. You are judging a carpenter’s son who dared to climb up to your level.”
When I read that line, I suddenly understood one thing: Julien had been fighting against his birth his entire life. His greatest crime was not the affair. Not the shooting. It was that he dared to believe he deserved to sit at the same table as the aristocrats.
The two colors in the title of this book — red is the military uniform, black is the priest’s cassock. They were the only two paths for a commoner’s son to climb into high society. Julien walked both paths. He walked both of them well. But he reached the end of neither.
The wall of class has been chipped with countless holes. But the wall is still there. Every young person who has ever felt that they “don’t belong here” can find their own reflection in this book. Julien’s shadow rises from the pages, brushes non-existent dust off its shoulders, and walks into the depths of my bookshelf. I know it will come out again. On the day it thinks I need a reminder.
